Recent Articles

Rex Features via AP Images Senior Fatah official Azzam Al-Ahmed, left, shakes hands with head of the Hamas government Ismail Haniyeh after announcing a reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah, in Gaza City. I t’s probably smart to view yesterday’s deal between the leading Palestinian factions Fatah and Hamas—in which the two groups agreed to create a consensus government and hold elections later this year—with some skepticism. Announced with similar fanfare, accords in Cairo in 2011 and in Doha in 2012 went nowhere, with neither side believing it had more to gain than lose from agreeing to share power. There are reasons to believe this time is different, though. It came after the first delegation of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) leaders sent to Gaza since the brutal 2007 Fatah-Hamas civil war . The agreement was signed in Palestine—in Gaza City, to be exact—rather than a foreign capital. What’s more, reconciliation remains hugely popular amongst Palestinians. In...

I t was the “poof” heard ‘round the world. Or at least halfway ‘round the world. Speaking before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, Secretary of State John Kerry described the sequence of events leading to the current crisis in talks between Israelis and Palestinians, which came to a head with the announcement of 700 new Israeli settlement homes. “Poof, that was sort of the moment,” Kerry said. “We find ourselves where we are.” To back up a bit, last July Kerry successfully got the two sides back to the table for nine months of talks by securing concessions from both. The Palestinians agreed to pause their efforts to gain membership in international organizations, which they are now able to do as a consequence of being accepted as a “non-member observer state” by the United Nations in 2012. The Israelis agreed to release 104 Palestinian prisoners held since before the 1994 Oslo Accords, in four tranches, the last of which was to have been released on March 29. As March...

I srael’s announcement on Wednesday that its naval commandoes had seized a civilian ship laden with Iranian rockets bound for militant groups in Hamas-ruled Gaza came a day late to be included in the bill of particulars against Iran in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s annual conference. But it did come in time for a briefing of the House Foreign Affairs Committee by Israeli Intelligence Minister Yuval Steinitz, who used it to bolster the argument that Iran’s only true face is the terrorist one. “You see on the one hand there is this charm offensive” from Iranian President Hassan Rohani and Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Steinitz told The Daily Beast . “And now you discover underneath the mask of this charm offensive, that Iran is still the same Iran.” Make no mistake, this is bad news, the latest exhibit in a sizable portfolio demonstrating again Iran’s destabilizing support for violent extremist groups in the...

E arlier this week, Reuters broke the story that Iraq had signed a deal to purchase $125 million worth of arms and ammunition from its eastern neighbor and former bitter enemy, the Islamic Republic of Iran. If carried through, the deal would violate a UN arms embargo on Iran, in place since March 2007 . It’s the latest evidence of the new relationship that has steadily developed between two countries that fought a hugely destructive war between 1980 and 1988. Responding to the report, U.S. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki warned that “any transfer of arms from Iran to a third country is in direct violation” of UN Security Council resolutions, and said the U.S. was “seeking clarification on this matter from the government of Iraq and to ensure that Iraqi officials understand the limits that international law places on arms trade with Iran.” The Iraq defense ministry issued a statement that a deal had not been finalized. The fact that Iraq’s government is close to Iran’s is not...

AP Images/SodaStream T he recent contretemps over actress Scarlett Johansson’s work for an Israeli company, partly based in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank, highlights the growing international movement to pressure Israel economically to end its occupation. But it also highlights the need for American progressives to speak more clearly and explicitly about the policy outcome they’d like to see. Two weeks ago, when Al Jazeera America initially covered the increasing criticism over Johansson’s agreeing to become “brand ambassador” for the Israeli company SodaStream, which has a factory in the settlement of Ma’ale Adumim near Jerusalem, it was mocked as a “ puny controversy .” Johansson “is apparently a huge fan of SodaStream’s product and will star in the company’s upcoming Super Bowl ad,” the Daily Beast ’s Nina Strochlic wrote, “no matter what those four people on Twitter say.” Within two weeks, however, the issue had grown, according to a Reuters headline, into a “ Super Bowl-...